short and insightful writing about a long and complex history

The Stoned Ages

Editor’s Note: This early posting on the HNN documentary “The Stoned Ages,” does not discuss the show’s content. For commentary and analysis of the show, and a few links for further reading, click here.

Programming alert! Tomorrow evening (Wednesday, September 21) at 9 PM, the History Channel will broadcast a one-hour special program on drug history, called “The Stoned Ages.” The work of director/producer Adam Barton (though the title comes from publicity-keen History Channel folks), the program may or may not feature some of your Points contributors. Both David Herzberg and I, along with several others, were interviewed by Adam during the recent Alcohol and Drugs History Society conference in Buffalo. In my experience, I found Adam be an eager and engaged consumer of academic histories on the subject of drugs. Here’s the description of the program, from the History Channel site:

From the early cave dwellers who first stumbled upon psychedelic mushrooms to the over 6000-year-old tradition of opium cultivation in the East to a modern pharmaceutical industry with over 24,000 drugs on the market, drugs have played a role in our lives since well before recorded human history. Explore the reasons we’ve used drugs through the ages, while considering the devastating consequences that accompany the choice to use certain drugs. This fascinating, fresh, and insightful documentary will ask the question: overall, have drugs done more to help us or hurt us? Host Dean Norris will journey through the millennia and look in on the greatest civilizations in human history to discover if drugs helped these societies flourish or fail and whether drug use was holy or hedonistic, a savior or a curse?

Now, I understand that academic historians have treated the History Channel with some ambivalence.

The Stoned Ages--Airs Immediately after these Guys

Indeed, ambivalence may have been the high-water mark, characteristic of HC’s early years, when the network programming dwelt on conventional military and political history. In recent years, the channel’s been drifting further from the original history concept, drawing commentary that’s, well, less ambivalent and more directly hostile.

So, what should we expect from “The Stoned Ages”? Anyone who has ever had two hours of talking edited down to two minutes will almost certainly agree that there’s no way to tell just what it will sound like. I hope you’ll join me in taking a look, and then back here at Points to discuss the results, which ought to make an interesting lead in to the upcoming Ken Burns’ Prohibition series (more on that soon).

4 thoughts on “The Stoned Ages”

it was fascinating. we are living in an age of addiction. not just the street users, closet abusers and alcoholics but we are doped/dumbed down & put to sleep courtesy of Phizer et al, big business. While asleep the Powerful & Wealthy took over. We kill the ones enlightened by drugs-shrooms, etc & we got lazy, lived large on credit & fell asleep. Now it is too late. The evil ones are ruling the world. It all ties in with 2012 transition as “seen” by the Maya & Hopi…..now we are like, uh oh !! the right and left are extreme. great civilizations fall and our is about to. will we still have our Iphones? i don’t know….but change, it is coming….and hopefully we will find our way back to the spiritual connection the ancients knew that we have lost here in the “material” world….going to be an interesting ride. and it is a ride. this is not the end all & be all of it all. and, no, you greedy, power hungry fascist capitalists, you cannot take it with you or leave a legacy. Greed is not the way…Love is….and we MUST realize this NOW

I understand the English register their heroin users. I think the U.S. ought to follow such a policy. Register all heavy drug users, let them buy their dope at a local pharmacy at subsidized rates. In return, they do not drive, operate heavy equipment, work around children. They also forfeit the right to vote. Sounds like a good deal for a Kinison or a Leary.